In this inaugural event of a 4-part series marking the 20th anniversary of 9/11, artists, lawyers and scholars will be reflecting on the impact of the post-9/11 “global security” framework on communities fighting for their rights to be, to move, to believe and to resist.

From the indefinite detention of Muslim men in Guantanamo, to the unending repression of the Black freedom movement, to suppression of advocacy for Palestine, and to the racist immigration and border regimes, panelists will trace the harms of post-9/11 policies with an emphasis on the ever-expanding terrorism framework. The conversation will highlight stories of creative resistance to U.S. policies of criminalization and dehumanization, and point towards new horizons of community safety and collective flourishing.

More about the series, Just Resistance: 20 years of Global Struggle Against the Post-9/11 Human Rights Crisis: To mark the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Haymarket Books and our partners are pleased to present a 4-part series, "Just Resistance: 20 years of global struggle against the post-9/11 human rights crisis." The series is an opportunity to bring together our colleagues and comrades from impacted communities across the world, to center stories of survival, and to contextualize the last two decades of U.S. policy within a history of imperialism, domination and impunity. Over the course of the series, we will also invite audiences to imagine the next twenty years of demilitarization and decolonization.

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Speakers:

Sadie Barnette’s multimedia art practice illuminates her own family history as it mirrors a collective history of repression and resistance in the United States. Barnette holds a BFA from CalArts and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. She has been awarded grants and residencies by the Studio Museum in Harlem, Art Matters, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. Her work is in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Oakland Museum of California; Studio Museum in Harlem; Brooklyn Museum; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She lives and works in Oakland, CA, and is represented by Jessica Silverman in San Francisco. Sadie Barnette: Legacy & Legend, a partnership between the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College and Pitzer College Art Galleries, is currently on view through December 19, 2021.

Omar Farah is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and is the lead lawyer in Color of Change v. Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation, which seeks records that reveal the government’s expansive surveillance of the Movement for Black Lives. Omar focuses on an array of CCR’s litigation and advocacy in response to abusive policing and counterterrorism practices, including the unlawful surveillance of Muslim American communities, the criminalization of dissent, and systemic, unlawful policing practices. For more than a decade, he has also litigated habeas corpus challenges on behalf of several current and former Guantánamo Bay prisoners, including Tariq Ba Odah, who spent nearly nine years on hunger strike before being released to Saudi Arabia in 2016. Omar regularly speaks about law and policy at the intersection of national security and the criminalization of Black, Brown, and immigrant communities in the United States. His work has been covered by major news outlets, including The New York Times, MSNBC, Democracy Now!, and Al Jazeera. Omar’s opinion pieces have appeared in Rolling Stone, The Huffington Post, and The Global Journal, among others. He is a graduate of Columbia University and Georgetown University Law School.

Silky Shah is the Executive Director of Detention Watch Network (DWN), a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the US. She has worked as an organizer on issues related to immigration detention, mass incarceration, and racial and migrant justice for over 15 years. In her time at DWN she has helped transform the organization into a national leader in the immigrant rights movement, leading campaigns to expose the system and building the capacity of grassroots members to take action. Prior to joining DWN in 2009, Silky worked at Grassroots Leadership in Texas fighting the expansion of immigrant jails on the US-Mexico border and at the independent news program, Democracy Now!, in New York.

Tarek Z. Ismail is an Associate Professor of Law at the CUNY School of Law. Prior to joining CUNY Law’s faculty, he served as Senior Staff Attorney at the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) project, which primarily aims to address the legal needs of Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and other communities in the New York City area that are particularly affected by national security and counterterrorism policies and practices deployed by various law enforcement agencies. Prior to joining CLEAR, Tarek was a staff attorney in the Family Defense Practice at the Brooklyn Defender Services. From 2011-2013, Tarek was the Counterterrorism & Human Rights Fellow at Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute. In that role, Tarek researched and wrote on issues ranging from administrative detention, targeted killings, and US domestic counterterrorism policy. Tarek is the lead author on a report co-published with Human Rights Watch, which examined and exposed human rights abuses in domestic counterterrorism prosecutions, Illusion of Justice: Human Rights Abuses in US Terrorism Prosecutions, and has written and spoken widely on related issues. Tarek holds a law degree from Columbia Law School is a graduate of the University of Virginia.

Nadia Ben-Youssef (moderator) is the Advocacy Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Together with the legal, advocacy, and communication teams, Nadia identifies opportunities for the Center for Constitutional Rights to make strategic cultural and political interventions that shift public narrative and policy on human and civil rights. She has expertise in international human rights fora and mechanisms, and extensive experience developing advocacy strategies to influence U.S. decision-makers. Her work often centers at the intersection of art and advocacy, and she curates exhibits and artistic programming that document key human rights concerns, celebrate social movements, and allow creatives the space to chart the future. Prior to coming to the Center for Constitutional Rights, she co-founded the Adalah Justice Project (AJP), a U.S.-based Palestinian advocacy organization that works to transform American discourse and policy on Palestine/Israel. AJP is an outgrowth of her work with Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel where, from 2010, she led international advocacy efforts from Adalah’s field office in the Naqab (Negev) in southern Israel before coming back to the U.S. to develop an American advocacy strategy. Nadia is a member of the New York State Bar, and holds a B.A. in Sociology from Princeton University, and a J.D. from Boston College Law School.

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This event is sponsored by Center for Constitutional Rights and Haymarket Books.